BURHOE AND SHAPLEY: A COMPLEMENTARITY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Abstract. The development of Ralph Wendell Burhoe's philosophy of religion and science occurred in the shadow of the continuing dialogue about the place of science in American society. Like his friend and mentor, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, Burhoe was distressed and intrigued by the troubled postwar relations between science and religion. Unlike Shapley, however, Burhoe sought to create a new modernism, a blend of religion and science that would allow each to develop and complement the other.     

A NEOPRAGMATIST PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Abstract. Pragmatists, most notably John Dewey and Richard Rorty, propose overcoming the modern split between science and values with a new image of ourselves as language users. In this new self-understanding, both our scientific and evaluative vocabularies are integral parts of self-reliant human problem solving and coping with the larger natural environment. Our language is not the medium of any higher power from which it derives its legitimacy. On this view, the principal matter at issue between pragmatists and realists so far as interaction between religion and science is concerned is the moral one of human self-reliance.     

RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN GERMANY

During the last fifty years, the dialogue between science and religion in Germany has gained momentum. This essay briefly describes the academic setting in Germany with denominational theology at state universities and explains the development of secularization in reunified Germany. Twenty‐five years after reunification, East Germany is one of the most secular societies in the world, and religion is seen as a strange relic. This poses challenges to the interaction between science and religion in both parts of Germany. The essay then presents important institutions and contributors to the interaction between science and religion in Germany over the past fifty years, emphasizing the importance of private institutes at the intersection of the academy with society, churches, and ethical challenges.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION: AN ORIGINS STORY

In recent scholarship, the science and religion debate has been historicized, revealing the novelty of the concepts of science and religion and their complex connections to secularization and the birth of modernity. This article situates this historicist turn in the history of philosophy and its connections to theology and Scripture, showing that the science and religion concept derives from philosophy's earlier tension with theology as it became an academic discipline centered in the medieval, then research university, with the centrality of Scripture changing under the influence of historical criticism. Looking at Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Schleiermacher on theology and Scripture's connection to science, it offers a new framework for theorizing science and religion as part of the history of philosophy.     

METHODOLOGY IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION: A REPLY TO CRITICS

Debates about methodology have been central to the emergence of the “field of science of religion.” Two questions that have motivated scholars in that field over the past half century: “is it theoretically justifiable to bring scientific and religious beliefs into dialogue?” and “can theology be rational in the same way as science?” This article responds to commentary on Against Methodology: Recent Debates on Rationality and Theology, a book which critically examines three major methodologists of recent years: Nancey Murphy, Alister McGrath, and J. Wentzel van Huyssteen. Themes raised in the commentary include the status of realism and truth in science, the unity of science, the adequacy of the term “critical realism,” proper ways of seeking legitimacy for an academic discipline, and new directions for the field of science and religion.     

A LITERARY TRINITY FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND RELIGION

The cognitive sciences may be understood to contribute to religion‐and‐science as a metadisciplinary discussion in ways that can be organized according to the three persons of narrative, encoding the themes of consciousness, relationality, and healing. First‐person accounts are likely to be important to the understanding of consciousness, the “hard problem” of subjective experience, and contribute to a neurophenomenology of mind, even though we must be aware of their role in human suffering, their epistemic limits, and their indirect causal role in human behavior and subsequent experience. Second‐person discussions are important for understanding the empathic and embodied relationality upon which an externalist account of mind is likely to depend, increasingly uncovered and supported by social neuroscience. Third‐person accounts can be better understood in uncovering the us/them distinctions that they encode and healing the dangerous tribalisms that put an interdependent and communal world increasingly at risk.     

FAITH AND DOUBT IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Abstract One of the contexts in which religion and science come into conflict is with regard to faith and doubt. Generally speaking, we associate faith with religion, which is opposed to doubt, and doubt with science, which is opposed to faith. Some critics of science have argued that science is also based on faith; others have shown that there is doubt in the religious context also. In this essay I clarify these positions by defining different types of faith and different types of doubt.     

NARRATIVE AND MEANING IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Differences of understanding in science and in religion can be explored via the distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of explanation. Although science is inclusive of the paradigmatic, I propose that in explaining the behavior of complex adaptive systems, and in the human sciences in particular, narratives may well constitute the best scientific explanations. Causal relationships may be embedded within, and expressions of higher-order constraints provided by, complex system dynamics, best understood via the temporal organization of intentionalities that constitute narrative. Complex adaptive systems, out of which intentions emerge, have behavioral trajectories that are in principle unique, contingent, and nondeterministic even in stable states and unpredictable across phase transitions. Given such unpredictability, the only explanation can be an interpretive story that retrospectively retraces the actual changes in dynamics. Without narrative, personality traits and human actions are incomprehensible. Such phenomena do not permit a reduction of purposive acts to nonpurposive elements or of reasons to the causes they constrain. Causality does not exhaust meaning. Given the role of narratives in human lives, religion and mythology provide larger stories within which individual stories make sense. Differences between narrative and historical truth suggest how we can be constituted by what we imagine ourselves to be.     

GLOCALIZATION: RELIGION AND SCIENCE AROUND THE WORLD

This essay explains the rationale behind a series of reviews on interactions between knowledge and values, science and religion, in different countries or regions around the world. The series will run in Zygon for the whole of 2015 and beyond. In the literature, it may seem that discussions in the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom are typical of the issues, but they need not be. David Livingstone showed that the reception of evolution differed, even among Calvinists in different countries. Thus, rather than an export model, we should take time to learn from scholars rooted in different contexts how in their situation issues on knowledge and values arise and are dealt with. In this interplay of global processes and local contexts, indicated with the term glocalization, we should be alert to the migration of concepts and the transformations that ideas undergo.     

SENSES OF REALITY IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION: A NEUROEPISTEMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract. The phenomenology of certain mystical states is contrasted with the sense of "baseline" reality in an exploration of primary senses of reality. Nine theoretical and eight actual primary senses of reality are described. A neurophysiological model is presented to account for these states, and their possible adaptive significance is considered from an evolutionary perspective. Finally the state of absolute unitary being is contrasted with baseline reality, and their competing claims for primacy are evaluated in an epistemological context.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN LATIN AMERICA: DEVELOPMENTS AND PROSPECTS

The state of the debate surrounding issues on science and religion in Latin America is mostly unknown, both to regional and extra‐regional scholars. This article presents and reviews in some detail the developments since 2000, when the first symposium on science and religion was held in Mexico, up to the present. I briefly introduce some features of Latin American academia and higher education institutions, as well as some trends in the public reception of these debates and atheist engagement with it in Mexico and Argentina. The primary conclusion of this article is that, even though the discussion is new to Latin American academic circles, it is gaining traction and will certainly grow in the coming years.     

THE SCIENCE AND RELIGION FORUM DISCUSS INFORMATION AND REALITY: QUESTIONS FOR RELIGIONS AND SCIENCE

The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) promotes discussion on issues at the interface of science and religion. The forum membership is diverse and it holds an annual conference to encourage exploration of issues that arise at the interface of science and religion. This article provides an overview of the hybrid conference that took place at the Woodbrooke Centre in Birmingham in May 2022. The conference addressed the issue of information and reality for religions and science across two broad themes. The first focused on metaphysical matters and the impact of the idea that information (quantum, biological, digital) are the fundamental building blocks of the universe, on our theological discourse. The second took a more ethical turn focusing on the issues raised by the interaction of information (biological, personal, digital) and science in society. This thematic section includes articles that span both strands of the conference including the public Gowland Lecture and the winning essay from the Peacocke Prize.